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by Mary K. Miller David Baltimore, from the California Institute of Technology, is a famous scientist and head of the effort to find an HIV vaccine. His press conference was jammed with reporters waiting to hear the latest. Sally Blower, from the University of California, San Francisco, was there too, talking about her work developing models for the spread of drug resistance for infectious diseases including HIV, herpes, and tuberculosis. Science press conferences are nothing like the counterparts you see on TV. If you're used to seeing presidential press conferences, for instance, you wouldn't recognize the gentile AAAS news briefings. For one thing, there's not sea of microphones and the reporters don't yell out their questions. Although they sometimes ask pointed queries, they're almost always focused on the researchers work, not on personal lives or foibles. These conferences are also international in flavor. We met British, German, Dutch, Mexican, Swiss, and Canadian reporters that work for newspapers, magazines, TV stations, and the web. They're using a variety of devices from pen and paper, to tape recorders, cameras, and computers. The questions are the best part of these briefings. It seems that the journalists know as much about the science as the researchers. Everyone's on a first-name basis, especially someone as media savvy as David Baltimore. You can hear for yourself in the accompanying short audio clips.
Image s and Scientific Understanding by Rob Semper As you pass the various meeting rooms at the AAAS annual conference, you can't help but notice the large screens at the front of each room filled with strange and unusual images of the world. These images, coming from the scientists' slides, videotapes, and computers, offer a glimpse of the world that is often invisible to the naked eye. Advances in scientific understanding are often tightly coupled to advanced instrument development. And instrument development is often triggered by a search for scientific understanding. The rapid development of new scientific visualization tools is leading to amazing images that provide fundamental understanding of the world. As Dr. Sean Carroll, researcher at the University of Wisconsin says, "seeing does change everything." This was nowhere more apparent than at the session titled "Imaging Development: From Single Cells to Complex Organisms." One of the major difficulties in understanding the biology is making sense of how the genetic and molecular level interacts with individual cells and the entire organism. Through the use of recently developed visualization tools, researchers are getting a new look at the process of embryo development. While it is easy to look at organismal processes in visible light with microscopes, seeing the microscopic molecular and dynamic cellular processes is something else altogether. The papers in this session all presented a tour de force use of visualization to explore different parts of the development process. By using fluorescent dyes that attach themselves to specific molecular sites, the normally invisible molecular events that drive the pattern development in a butterfly embryo can be seen. New light microscopy techniques and miniaturized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems provide structural and dynamic information about the development of the mouse embryo. These techniques are part of a world of visualizations that is exploding. These images, with their colored stripes, glowing spots, and roiling cells are unlike any I've seen before. As the research advances, the forms and the understanding they provide will doubtless be different. What is striking about these images is not only the new information that they provide, but their profound beauty. As usual, nature is constantly surprising us with its infinite variety of form and function.
By Mary K. Miller In a session on the origins of modern humans, organizer Loring Brace from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor said it's time to stop picking on the Neanderthals. These earlier humans are commonly portrayed as thick-browed, non-speaking brutes that survived through brawn rather than brains. The branch of early humans called Homo sapiens, our direct ancestors, were more delicate, with thinner bones, weaker joints and smaller teeth. These weaker humans didn't need their bare hands to kill prey, like the Neanderthals could do, because they developed language, a social structure that allowed them to hunt in groups, and deadly throwing weapons that could kill large prey from a safer distance. For thirty years Professor Brace has been the champion of Neanderthals, claiming they weren't so different than we are today. The physical differences in the body and head could have evolved gradually over time, he says, with a new branch of humans developing from the Neanderthals. His theory of human origins hasn't caught on, Brace says, because there's a long-standing prejudice against Neanderthals, a kind of "neandro-phobia," that keeps people from considering that they could be our ancestors. John Shea from the State University of New York has a slightly different take. He says we should actually thank the Neanderthals for making us who we are: social animals with sophisticated tools, able to give talks at scientific meetings. Professor Shea is an archaeologist who studies the bones and hunting tools of both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens that he finds buried in present-day Israel. He says that the two groups competed fiercely for food, much like today's lions and hyenas fight over antelope in Africa. Sometimes the physically stronger Neanderthals won and drove out Homo sapiens. But around 40,000 years ago, our ancestors developed a spear with a thin point, a hunting technology that gave them the ability to kill large game--and their competitors, the pesky Neanderthals. Combined with their language skills and social networks, Homo sapiens drove the Neanderthals out of their way and moved into Europe. Eventually, the Neanderthals disappeared altogether, leaving skinny spear throwers to populate the world.
© 1999
The
Exploratorium
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